OK Computer
by Erik's Champion
Summary: Elusive glimpses into the life of Seto Kaiba: the interlocking layers of pride, determination, and vulnerability that are continually swirling just beneath the surface.
1. Airbag

Airbag

Resurrected. That's what all the papers say. At this very moment every newsstand in Japan is overflowing with legions of sleek, shiny magazine covers proclaiming this to be the dawn of a new era, a stripping away of everything old ugly and secret. Kaibacorp has been valiantly seized from the ashes, rescued from the gaping abyss of destruction, furiously pieced together in the dead of night under the hungry glower of the moon. A hero has come charging into the midst of the battle with horns blazing, eyes firing sparks that could cause electrical burns.

I am that hero. I tore apart the crumbling façade of what KaibaCorp once claimed to be. I dragged it kicking, screaming, and spitting into the open expanse of the 21st Century, and have the bloody knuckles and bruised back to show for it.

What makes it worthwhile is the thought that I've proved them all wrong. All of the investors who shredded their stock the instant that news of Gozaburo's death plastered the papers—the same papers which now hail the new Kaibacorp as Japan's foremost corporate giant—all the cardboard old men that littered Gozaburo's board meetings who could barely contain their contempt the first time I took his former seat, all the people who said I was too young, too inexperienced, too _idealistic_ to be worth their time, I can taste their humiliation on my tongue like acid.

But I would be lying if I said that that was the most meaningful part. Because it's not, not even close at all. When I see the all those glossy, gleaming magazine covers featuring my face staring out at empty space, when I see KaibaCorp's stock towering towards the atmosphere higher than the Himalayas, when I see the new ruby red and onyx black sport cars stacked outside my home like faceless playing cards, I know that this is not what I fought for.

All the reporters always ask the same meaningless, monotonous question: How did I do it? How did I save my father's swarming cesspit of a company?

The truth is: I did not save it all.

I don't work for the six, seven figure salary, for the servants, for the respect of my employees or even the loyalty of my customers. I tore this company apart, ripped its eyes out of its sockets and chewed on its tendons. I came out crushed and crumbled, almost falling apart and scarcely breathing.

I did it because I wanted to be able to look myself in the mirror and know that I had done one thing in my life that was right. I did it, and I will keep doing it. I will work myself to death every day if it means that I can sleep at night.

I didn't save this company. It saved me.

It's been about 1000 years since I've been on this site, but I was struck by inspiration today and decided to give it another go. The idea of this series is to take an album and reinterpret it as a character's biography, not necessarily in chronological order. For Seto I chose OK Computer by Radiohead, and am aiming to do one chapter a night until my little project is completed.

I own nothing, and thanks for reading!


	2. Paranoid Android

Paranoid Android

Mokuba used to have trouble sleeping. There was something about the sudden deaths of our parents, our abrupt uprooting from everything familiar and safe, that made him come to fear the oppressive silence of night, that gaping window into the unknown. He has improved significantly, but his insomnia used to be so severe that he would lie awake in bed alright, convulsing rapidly and panting like a caged animal.

It was the worst when we lived with Gozaburo. Upon our arrival, he convinced himself that the Kaiba mansion was haunted, and I wasn't entirely convinced that he was wrong. That place always felt incredibly close to death for me.

I remember one night I was sitting working at my desk in the library surrounded by a wide gulf of silence, that kind that clings to your skin and bears down on your skull like a heavy iron fist. Suddenly, I felt like I was being watched. I heard muffled noises leaking through the towering bookshelves, the feathery rattle of poorly concealed breathing.

"Who's there?"

No response.

I assumed I had imagined it. I myself hadn't slept properly in weeks and had been diligently dragging myself through some of the denser textbooks in the library for the past several hours, so it was not too big of a leap to assume that any strange noises I thought I was hearing was merely a by-product of sleep-deprivation and sheer mental exhaustion. Nevertheless, I felt my veins tighten as my eyes darted through the blanket of darkness that surrounded me. I shrugged off the feeling, I went to back to work. I was never _really_ alone in the Kaiba mansion anyway, so maybe it didn't even matter.

It wasn't until Mokuba was standing beside me that I realized that my initial inclination had indeed been correct. He appeared so suddenly and so silently that I nearly stabbed his hand with my pencil when it appeared suddenly beside me on the table.

"God, Mokuba! You scared me! You're not even supposed to be in here." I was on the verge of telling him off for creeping down here in the middle of the night, threatening both our safety, when the tremor in his voice and tremble in his face caught my attention and forced me to listen.

"Seto…I'm scared. I think there's ghosts downstairs…"

"Ghosts don't exist, Mokuba. Go back to sleep. You were just having a bad dream." Sleep sounded good at the moment, to slowly descend deeper and deeper, maybe never coming back for air…

"I wasn't asleep, Seto! And I heard them. There's a lot of them! I'm not lying, I promise." He looked sincere, frightened. His hands were cupped in little fists, his eyes pleading with the still night air to yield, to comfort him.

My temples ached. "And what do you expect me to do about it?"

"Will you…check for me?" I did a poor job masking my exasperation. We weren't children anymore, I didn't have time for these kinds of games and fantasies. But he looked so small, so shaken, against the walls of blackness, against my equally foreboding stack of textbooks. I needed to take a break anyway.

"Alright, alright. Where were these voices coming from?"

He was afraid to speak. As if the ghosts might descend on him should he reveal their secret location. But he managed to pull a string of voice out of him. "In…in the dining room."

He followed me out of the library, fingers clenched tightly enough around my sleeve to strangle it. I had to admit, at this time of night the entire house had an almost palpable nightmarish quality to it, almost as if the walls were about to lean in and devour you. But no evidence of ghosts that I could detect.

"You're being paranoid."

He shook his head vigorously. "Just wait till we get closer."

And then I heard it. The low rumble of laughter, the metallic chime of wine glasses, the heavy thunder of footsteps, all emanating from the downstairs dining room that Gozaburo used to host dinner parties. I carefully untangled Mokuba's hand from mine, and told him to wait for me a few steps away from the entryway—I would go investigate for him.

At this point in the evening all serious talk of business had mutated into drunkenness and stupor, making it easier for me to sneak in undetected. All the elaborate imported decorations placed along the perimeter of the room didn't hurt either. Crouched behind the statue of a fiercely armed and glowering Montu, I could see the blurs of their bloated faces, stained red from a mixture of mirth and ambition, made even more potent by the lowered inhibitions often accompanied by alcohol.

Gozabura was positioned in the middle of the crowd, like the great blossoming sun of the universe that all the sad little planets clung to so desperately to for life and validation. I hated all of them, even then. They were weak as weeds, pale and tepid as a glass of water, blood thick and slow like a river massacred by industrial waste. They all laughed together like one giant, pulsating organism, incapable of standing or even thinking on its own without some kind of satellite-based guidance system.

Which was, ironically, the topic currently under discussion.

"Now we all know the paradox. The more we invest in more accurate guidance technologies, the less potent the bombers become. I mean, if everyone sat around at their computers all day doing calculations to try and minimize the amount of civilian casualties—we would simply never get anything done. Sometimes you have to make these kinds of sacrifices."

"But have you read some of these reports? Whole villages destroyed…and sometimes not even due to poor guidance technology just…carelessness. How do we justify that kind of malfeasance to investors?"

"The investors? Why do they have to know? Why would they _care_? Everyone knows that KaibaCorp's not a humanitarian agency. Hell, adopting those two kids is probably the closest thing to philanthropy that I've ever done!" Laughter.

"Listen." He went on, beckoning them closer. "We gentlemen are part of a very select and important group of individuals. When the Industrial Revolution began, do you know what it did? It created a new world order, and not just between the industrialized nations and the rest, but between _individuals_. There emerged those who were able to understand and, and to _manipulate_ the new technologies, and there were those that didn't. The inventors, the capitalists, the bosses, came to replace the kings and queens. With time, they came to wield more power than whole national assemblies. They fought off the restrictions, the rules that bind normal men down. They won the Earth for us, and now it is our job to carry on their legacy. It's our job to replace the gods themselves, to recreate the world in _our_ own image. We are not _destroying_ the world men, we are _rebuilding_ it. That process is not always pretty, I'll admit, but no one ever said that it was going to be."

"And the investors…"

"Don't need to know. There are some times when it does people best to not know where their money is coming from. If we all knew the story behind where everything came from, could we ever really be happy?"

"I didn't know that you were so concerned about the emotional stability of our investors." Chuckles.

"I'm more concerned about their intellectual capacity. When you tell people things that they don't understand their first reaction is to get upset about it, that would be their initial reaction. It's just one of the hurdles that the true industrialist has to fight to get past. But they'll understand in time, once our new world is complete."

"And how long do you think this will take? Surely it cannot be completed in your lifetime? In any of our lifetimes?"

He sighed. "Unfortunately I don't believe that any of us shall live to see the fruits of our labors. But that is where Seto comes in. it's not an ideal situation I admit, I always thought Noa much more capable of carrying out my vision than that boy will ever be. But I have hope that with the proper education…"

I leaned against the floor, pulled myself out of that room about as easily as you could pull yourself out of black hole. Suddenly I understood why I had been studying nuclear physics for the past four hours. Suddenly I knew why this house never felt completely silent, why I never felt completely alone.

I found Mokuba in the hall, practically crumbling in a fit of panic and bitter silver tears. He grabbed me the instant I emerged.

"You were right, Mokuba. There are ghosts in there. But they won't hurt you, they'll be gone in the morning." My words seemed to calm him, and for the first time he looked like he was ready to slide under a layer of sleep.

I lead him back to his room, put him to bed.

I couldn't get to sleep that night, nor the night after. I think that night Mokuba gave his insomnia to me. Sometimes at night all I do is stare at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of exploding plaster, of children dying too quickly to scream. Sometimes I feel like they're close enough to grab me, to force me to reign in on a debt that I never should have had to acquire.

I'm not paranoid. I just need some sleep.


	3. Subterranean Homesick Alien

Subterranean Homesick Alien

On some level, I've always known that I was different from the other kids. I didn't play well with others, preferred not to work in groups. Other people always ended up ruining my plans, clumsily interpreting my visions, resulting in a finished product that was far inferior to what I had anticipated. The teachers said I was shy, but I knew that that was false. I had no trouble talking to others, communicating my ideas and giving directions. They just chose not to listen properly, so I decided to stop wasting my time trying.

This was easy enough to do when I lived with my parents. Before their death I led a structured, yet simple life. Few demands were made on me to be sociable, and for the most part I was left alone with my imagination and my fantasies and private little construction projects. When I think back on that time I don't remember many specific details, I can't even remember the sounds of my parent's voices. What I do remember are wide open spaces, gracefully arching ceilings that towered like a frosted sky above me. I remember the freedom, the taste of infallibility, the liberation of escaping into the mind when the exterior world simply would not do. Mokuba was the only one I've ever allowed to come into this world with me; he is the only one who would understand.

My lifestyle changed drastically after the death of our parents. My smooth, stable home life disintegrated into a frenzied merry-go-round of foster homes, orphanages, brightly colored classrooms and shining kaleidoscopes of noise and activity. I wasn't accustomed to the high levels of external stimulation; I despised living in an environment that I couldn't control. Needless to say, the other children didn't take much to me either.

They clearly were not fit to enter in my world.

I remember one night in one of our temporary parent's homes. They were serial foster parents—a couple never able to conceive their own children but desperate to patch up the void that was quickly enveloping their marriage with as many unsuspecting young people as possible. We had two more siblings at that time, one older than me, one younger.

Since Mokuba and I arrived at the house later than they did, custom dictated that we submit to their authority. There might have been parents in the house, but in our subterranean adolescent society, those boys were the real source of discipline. We had our own rules, only secret culture that always lurked just beyond the visible spectrum and rendered adult rules thin and meaningless.

Our parents had no idea. Adults can be so stupid.

They had a favorite game that they forced us to play nearly every night. While one person—usually Mokuba, since he was the youngest—sat quietly outside our parent's door to listen for any indication that they were awake, the other three would sit in a circle on the floor of our bedroom, skin scrubbed clean by the moonlight that streamed in through one giant window. We would take turns lying down on the floor, head against the dresser, eyes to the stars, completely still. The other two would inch closer, closer, two big black shadows whispering amongst themselves like angry ghosts.

I told myself to take deep breaths. Deep, long, frigid cold gulps of stiff nighttime air. Just stay calm. Just don't die.

Then, they slipped a tie around my neck, cinched it tight till I could feel my skin screaming for air. Then I felt nothing at all.

My body was gone. It disappeared from me into the air, mingling with the stars that just a moment ago had seemed too far away. I had no memories, no past to run from, no future rushing to come meet me. There was only this silence, a deep pool of peace and happiness that I could slowly sink in to, maybe never to come out.

In my world there were white majestic beasts that wrapped their wings around the world, adorned in wreaths of moonlight, their wings the dusts of a thousand galaxies. There were howling golden figures, battling with sabers of fire, as if they had forged them from the interior of the earth. They had the biggest and most beautiful eyes, and when they looked at me—me, no longer with a shell of a body to protect that thing I called myself—I felt like they really knew me. They not only saw, they tasted, they felt me, they destroyed me and they made me whole.

In those moments I grasped the edge of death, I broke the limits of time, picked apart its linear nature and melted it into plasma in my fingers. I felt everything, saw every color that had no name. I was completely, fundamentally alone, and yet it was only when I woke up that I felt lonely.

My eyes always opened crying. They asked me what I saw, what I felt. I always lied. I couldn't explain the feeling, how I felt like I had been alive for a thousand years, and that yet my life was only just beginning. I couldn't put into words how this world no longer felt like home, how words and numbers were a mere translation of what they really meant, how everyone was so far apart and so incapable of seeing the world through the same set of eyes that—just perhaps—there was no point in trying to befriend anyone in the first place.

I couldn't explain how I felt homesick for a place I had never seen. How I missed someone that I had never met, how the waking world bore down on me, too heavy to breathe. I couldn't explain these feelings to myself, let alone articulate them to someone else. So I told them that I saw nothing and we switched places and played again.

And people wonder why I abandoned business for fantasy.

I don't play that game anymore, I haven't since we got packed up again and moved into another orphanage. But there are still times when I look to the sky, and wonder if there really ever was someone waiting up there for me. It's stupid, but sometimes, surrounded by my reality of hard corners and sharply defined edges, rigid rules of right and wrong, what's real and what's not, I long for a little ambiguity, I want to blow down a few walls.

Those kinds of rules never sat well with me.


	4. Exit Music For a Film

Exit Music (For a Film)

I've had many firsts in my life. New homes, new schools, new parents, my whole identity has essentially been dissembled and cobbled back together with the spare parts left laying around the warehouse of some giant industrial god with a twisted sense of humor.

The endless strings of adjustments and readjustments are never easy, but they become bearable. When your environment is a continually shifting kaleidoscope of sensory experiences, the external gradually loses its importance. What becomes most meaningful is what some might consider the most ephemeral: the landscape of the interior world—the dreams, the imagination, so powerful and audacious in the mind but so acutely fleeting when exposed to the cold acid-washed scrutiny of the physical world.

I've developed a thick skin to the outside world, to glaring scrutiny and blatant incompetence, to the rules that I can choose whether or not I wish to obey. I've come to understand that I am by and large independent of the constraints that confine most people to the physical realm.

That being said, despite all that I have been through, I must grudgingly admit that my second first day at Domino High School was perhaps one of the most difficult of my entire life.

Waking up was difficult enough. To sleep for months as a shell of a human being and suddenly wake up with a conscience is like reentering the Earth's gravitational field after spending years serenely orbiting through the silence of space. I had to go through months of intensive physical therapy sessions, fumbling around like a child just learning to walk. I had to relearn how to navigate through the world, how to pull apart the very same puzzles that I had spent so many years meticulously solving. I had to regrow my skin, resharpen my mind, regain my dignity.

The first few weeks were incredibly difficult. I felt like I had been somehow fundamentally _reduced_, pulled back through time like a tree seized by the roots and dragged back into the ground. My own home felt like a museum to me, a shrine to a person I had once been but could no longer recognize as myself. I was essentially a void, an absence that needed to be filled, some kind of elaborate feat of engineering that had expectedly crumpled under the force of a sudden gust of wind, leaving its designers puzzled and bitterly confused, pouring over their blueprints and calculations and left to wonder where in their faultless planning they had gone wrong.

For those first few weeks, I was a hole in the earth, some kind of mystery that needed to be solved. An incompletion.

It was Mokuba who tried the hardest to fill me, but by definition he could only be partially successful. I had to fill this hole myself. Just as a historian attempts to recreate the past by delving into ancient texts, I had to restructure myself in the image of what I believed I had once been, but this was an incredibly difficult task, impossible to process linearly.

I looked through old photographs, news clippings, family records (there weren't many), any legal or personal documents I could find that might allow me to ascertain even the most tremulous glimpse of my identity. I carefully scrutinized the way people addressed me, the types of expectations they seemed to have regarding my demeanor. I conducted interviews of my employees, business partners—all covertly of course. But I felt that all I could gather from this process was an image, a flat surface projection of what should rightly have been a three-dimensional structure.

My employees taught me that I was to be respected, my partners that I was admired for my intelligence and incisive business decisions. Mokuba showed me that I could be kind, if pressed by the right set of external circumstances. I found nothing particularly wrong with this image that I had created, only I could not avoid the twinge of a feeling that I was overlooking something fundamental, something that none of my previous experiments had yet been able to reveal to me.

I knew that until this piece was uncovered, I would remain a shell, a fragment of a person, like a chemical reaction that has never gone to completion and sits to wallow in its own unused components. If I failed in this reconstruction then I would be a waste of a person, like a table with only two legs I would be unable to stand.

I felt compelled to understand, but the deeper I delved into trying to penetrate these mysteries the more resistance I began to sense from the people around me. Mokuba especially tried to impede my progress. He withheld information from me, sometimes I think he lied to me, or at the very least avoided providing me with the complete truth that I so badly desired. I believed that he was trying to sabotage me, and became even more determined to uncover these secrets on my own.

Months passed. I chose to relocate from the Kaiba Mansion—its gaping open spaces seemed to only taunt me. Those rooms hung open like the fissures in my understanding, the negative space consumed me on the inside and I could not bear to see it reflected so strongly in my physical environment.

I did not intend to return to Domino High School. Receiving a high school diploma seemed like a rather arbitrary landmark in the progression of childhood to the adult world—a path that I felt like I had transversed numerous times already. However, the business world being what it is—a world of very strictly defined and stifling traditions—I was rather curtly informed by one of my business associates that I would never be able to win the respect of some of our international partners without the minimum in formal education.

I wish I hadn't listened. Had I been in a more stable and composed psychological state I probably wouldn't have.

The moment I set foot on the grounds of the school I felt that something had gone terribly wrong here. Another of those engineering accidents, no doubt. The whispers of the students, the darting in their eyes, the way they shied away from me in the hallways—it was unsettling. I was unnerved by the responses I received—largely because they seemed to be so motivated by fear. Up until now I had received mostly respect and admiration from my associates, and I was quite puzzled as to why the psychological response I encountered from my fellow classmates deviated so strongly from this previously established pattern.

I was intrigued, and apprehensive. I knew as I walked the halls and sat in my classrooms that this unusual response must be a key to the missing pieces of my ravaged and decrepit identity, and the thought that the truth might be nearby flooded me with an icy prick of exhilaration. Finally the pieces would fall into place, I would see the complete assemblage of my identity as opposed to these poorly cobbled fragments.

I was still puzzling over what this final, completed image would reveal when I encountered it squarely in the jaw. Upon leaving my last class, I was assaulted by a fierce and gruesome boy with the hair and aggression of a starved lion.

Staggering to the ground, quite taken aback, I muttered bitterly, "What the _hell_ was that for?"

"Are you kidding me? What the hell do you think it was for, bastard? The nerve of you—daring to show your face here again after what you did to us? You should be rotting in prison, or worse. Figures the rich kids always get off." He practically snarled blood, and looked ready to break me. This was incomprehensible.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Ah, yeah? Maybe you want me to remind you then, eh?" He had raised his fist and was about to punch me again when another boy, much smaller in stature, rushed to his side, eyes pleading for mercy.

"Jou, what are you doing? Please don't get yourself into trouble again, not now!" Something in this little boy seemed to satiate the wild torrents of anger in the other boy, sand him down around the edges, though the smell of burning iron still seemed to radiate off his skin.

"But how can you just let him walk around here, flaunting that he's gotten away with it? He tried to kill us!"

I looked into that little boy's eyes, at first glance like heaping pools of purity, but rimmed around the edges like a chain-link fence, and it pulled at something inside me. A string tied to something I had buried deep down and hoped to forget. There was some kind of hate in him.

"I know, Jou…" he murmured, "But I think that Kaiba-kun is going through a very hard time right now. I think that he's…trying to find himself." He smiled. "It will be alright, Jou."

He snorted. "You're too naïve, Yuugi. I know Kaiba and I know that he's evil down to the core."

Yuugi looked sorrowful for a moment. And he looked again at me with those eyes, eyes like curdled blood. "C'mon, Jou," he said. "Let's go home. Goodbye Kaiba-kun, I'll see you tomorrow!"

The two went down the hall, the taller one not failing to give me a deathly glare over his shoulder as he went.

And now, quite suddenly, the portrait was complete. I finally understood what Mokuba hadn't wanted me to know.

At my core, I was a monster.

As they left, I murmured after them, "Had to get your girlfriend to come calm you down, did you? She must keep you on a tight leash."


	5. Let Down

Let Down

"You're very great, you know that?" Pause. "You've accomplished many things that I could never hope to achieve in all my time on earth." He sighs, searching for the right thing to say. But it doesn't exist. I know that and he doesn't.

"I don't need your _sympathy_."

"I'm not offering you any sympathy, Seto. I'm giving you my respect."

"I don't need that either! Just get the fuck off my island!"

He draws back, startled, almost hurt, and like a wave rippling through water everything changes for a moment then suddenly goes back to exactly the way it was before, only completely different.

"I just wanted you to know, Kaiba-kun." He stammers. "That's all."

"You think I care about your _respect_? You think that I need it, that I _want _it? You—you're nothing compared to me! I don't need you to tell me that!"

He looks scared. He should be. Walking back to the elevators, he looks over his shoulder at me one last time, eyes coated with some mélange of emotions that I can't define. He's such a little boy.

-break-

The silence that settled over them was oppressive, consuming all thought and emotion with a ravenous, gaping hunger. Even the air seemed to be holding its breath; the sunlight was too frightened to reflect off the gleaming glass and steel surfaces that coated every edge of the interior of the Kaiba tower. The world was tied down by a stiff, gloomy tension that threatened to strain and burst at any moment, sending everything into a raging inferno of anger and despair.

Holed up in his study, palms shaking and shoulders hunched, Seto was vaguely aware that he was responsible for it all—that his little planetary system of employees and fellow duelists had halted in its orbit, and that all their thoughts and all their happiness were being sucked into the yawning abyss of the black hole that had once been their shining, optimistic sun. And that black hole was inside him.

Under normal circumstances he would have relished the power to manipulate the emotional state of so many people, he would have seen it as a testament to his supreme authority, the momentum of his character that was capable of disrupting the paths of so many other people. Yuugi was not even celebrating his victory, either out of respect for Seto's distress or out of his of fear of it. But the thought brought him nothing—no pride, no self-respect. It only hung there before him, stupid and empty, like an unfinished sentence at the end of a novel that failed to give the narrative a compelling conclusion.

Outside, Mokuba had been keeping his ear firmly pressed to the door for the last half hour, listening intently for any signs that his brother might be in distress. At first it had been rough, he had heard a fury of crashing, cursing, things being torn apart and left lying on a decaying heap on the floor. But now there was only silence—either a sign that Seto had calmed down somewhat, or an indication that something far worse was lurking behind the barrier of his office doors. Hand on the knob, Mokuba was considering venturing in, when he felt a gentle tap on his shoulder.

"Hello, Mokuba," Isis' voice slipped out like spiraling ribbons of silk. "Is Mr. Kaiba in?"

Mokuba, caught off guard by her presence, stumbled in his reply, "He is…but I don't think you want to go in there. And I bet he doesn't want visitors."

"Yes I can understand that," she nodded, eyes coated in what seemed to be an eternal river of wisdom. "But I think he might appreciate what I have to say."

"I'm not so sure…" his eyes narrowed slightly as he felt a tide of his sibling protectiveness flare up in him like a spark. "I'm sure you don't mean any harm or anything, but I don't think Seto needs any guests right now."

"That may very well be true, but I wish not to come to Mr. Kaiba as a guest, but as a friend."

Her words soothed Mokuba's anxieties slightly, but his wall of suspicion was not fully disassembled. After considering for a moment, he finally decided to concede slightly. "Let me just ask him…"

It wasn't until Mokuba turned back to the door, now with the full intention of pushing it open, that he realized how frightened he was. He had an unsettling suspicion, lurking inside him like a snake across grass, that whoever was inside that office, it wasn't his brother.

Sensing his trepidation, Isis interceded as delicately as possible. "Let's ask together, how's that Mokuba?"

He nodded sullenly, and they pushed the door open together. The moment that the office was exposed wide, Mokuba was incredibly glad that he wasn't doing it alone. It felt like prying open a raw wound and hoping that he wouldn't cause an infection.

The room unleashed the bitter, boiling smell of melted metal mixed with the foul acid of disappointment and self-loathing. The walls seemed to wrap and sway, as if the entire room was a mere edifice, about to collapse in on itself to reveal something far more sinister. Every molecule of air seemed to be somehow alive, aware, as if they were all part of some massive interconnected network that could reach inside and colonize him. The weight of that consciousness was oppressive, like swimming in a frozen lake and not knowing where the next point to surface would be.

And what was perhaps the worst, he felt foul for entering, as if he were trespassing some sacred and ancient barrier into a world fundamentally different from his own, where he knew as well as anyone else that he had no right to be. Had he ever discussed the experience with Yuugi, the other would have found it remarkably similar to what he had felt going into Yami's soulroom.

The floor was scattered with the brutalized remnants of Seto's duel disk, dissected with a surgical level of cruelty similar to that shown by serial killers for their victims. Chairs were overturned, the leaves of books and business reports speckled every surface like pale flakes of ivory blood. Everything in the room testified to bloody carnage, chaos, wrath so precise and so powerful that every surface seemed to moan. And in the center of it all was a sight that Mokuba thought he would never see—his brother, always so tall, proud, and elegant like a lighthouse towering over a storm, sat slouched and defeated on his desk, face towards the window, looking as small and shattered as the lone survivor of a world war.

"Uh, nii-sama?" Mokuba's voice sounded soft and delicate compared to the torrents of violence that surrounded him. There was no reply. He waited a few minutes, exchanged worried glances with Isis, then tried again. "Se—"

"I heard you." His voice was dry, heavy, and as oppressive as a blanket of fog. "Leave me alone."

Mokuba was about to lead the way out when Isis broke in, her confidence surprising all three of them. "Mr. Kaiba, I would like to talk to you."

Seto's back rippled through a wide range of emotions before he finally replied in a dry monotone. "I don't have time for any more stories about faeries and unicorns. Go away."

Undaunted, Isis kept her voices and shoulders as level as a board. "Leave this to me, Mokuba," she said steadily. Mokuba was hesitant to obey her, for the safety of both her and his brother, but her cool certainty, her straight sense of purpose in this chaotic and broken world made him want to believe her, even if he secretly thought that she was overestimating her ability to handle the fiery tumult of his brother's emotions. Closing the door behind him, he felt like he was locking a dove in a cage with a lion.

"I don't want to talk to you." Seto's words fell down like sheets of ice.

"I know, Mr. Kaiba." Isis battled down the well of fear that was bubbling inside her, tried to swallow it all down. However, something was missing—and they both knew it. There was no weight in his anger, his words were listless and limp.

"You here to laugh at me?"

"No, I would never do such a thing."

"To gloat?"

"No."

"To _sympathize_ with me? To tell me that we're all losers in this thing together and everything's going to be okay?" He snarled, but she knew as well as he did that the snarl was not directed at her.

"I assure you, Kaiba, I have no such intentions. To gloat over or insult you would bring as much displeasure and distress to me as it would to you."

He snorted. "Just go away. I don't want to talk to anyone." He made an involuntary shudder, like a small cowering animal. The effect of seeing such a great man—or at least, she had thought of him as a man until this moment—reduced to such a shockingly facsimile of existence was highly disconcerting. She no longer saw the man in him, but the tiny child wearing a man's skin. He seemed to be swimming in an image he had had of himself that was now fractured beyond either recognition or repair.

"I'm here to tell you that you're wrong, that you're doing this wrong."

He looked up at her in surprise, and his eyes looked sunken and dull.

"You come from a line of kings, a proud tradition that would shudder to see itself reduced to such a pitiful and shameless condition. You have worked too hard, and are worth too much to waste so much time wallowing in self-pity."

He gazed at her, and she could see machinery turning in his eyes. Something was coming alive in him, but she wasn't sure what it was. After studying her for a long time, he turned away.

"You don't know me."

"Yes I do." Her conviction sharpened her, made her taller and stronger. "The world knows you, Seto Kaiba. You have ensured that yourself. People the world over know what you represent, what your power represents. There is an ancient breed of loyalty in you, and that comes through in everything you do. You can't run away from your own most inner nature."

He laughed, a bitter, cruel sound that ripped the air around them. "You think I'm _special_?"

"You know you are."

He closed his eyes, and for a moment he was back floating on the evanescent clouds of his childhood, as deprived of human limitation and pain as he was of oxygen. He was the world, the heart of the universe, completely at peace as the time and space ticked on around him, under his control and at the same time a fundamental part of him.

"Be honest with yourself, Kaiba. You've always known that your density was too big to be contained by one age, one time. From your very first breath you sensed that you moved on a different plane than most people. Haven't you always felt alone, isolated, _different_?"

He cut her off. "As much as I appreciate the pep talk, I can't help but get the feeling that you're trying to talk to me into something that I've already told you I know is ridiculous."

She nodded. "You're right. My motivations for coming here were not completely altruistic . I want to see the king in you, Kaiba. The _real_ king. I want to see you take up the gauntlet of your destiny and take your proper place in the passage of time. It's what you were made to do. To save the pharaoh, to save the world."

His eyes narrowed and voice steeped, and this time she could sense the anger in him, ripe and piquant. "Before you get too caught up in your little fantasy world, let me make one thing completely clear: you're right, I do work hard. I am different from most people. I work harder than most people, I am more competent than most people—competent enough to distinguish reality from fairy tales, which apparently some people still have trouble with—and I know that I did not work this hard to become someone's pan-eonic sidekick. If you hadn't already struck such a low blow to my intelligence by assuming that I would believe you, the implication that I would see my ultimate role in life as being the assistant to that _thing_ would be the worst possible insult that you could level at me.

"Before I throw you out I want you to get this straight so that you can't ever claim to have misinterpreted my meaning: I work for _me_, I _live_ for _me_. Not for investors, not for you, not for my father, and _least_ of all for Yuugi Moto and his multiple personality disorder. Now get out before I have security remove you."

He spun around in defiance, glaring angrily out the window and refusing to acknowledge her. He became involved in his own thoughts so quickly and so intensely that she was fairly certain he had forgotten her presence—edited it out as irrelevant. But she couldn't let herself slip away like this. With every wild beat of her heart, every silver rattle of breath, she could feel her window of opportunity swiftly sliding shut. With every moment that passed she was becoming one step closer to returning to that subterranean land of eternal darkness, of anger and bad memories, of bottled resentment and a bottled existence. She couldn't let that happen—to either of them.

"Don't you want to know what it would feel like?" She asked softly, as much as to herself as to Seto. "To live in a world without limitations, to unchain yourself from time and arbitrary regulation? To find your true place in a world that is worthy of the magnitude of your spirit?"

"My place is here. I created it here." His words were stony, definitive.

"That's not true, Kaiba." His head twitched slightly. She could tell he was curious, though he was trying hard to hide it. "You may think of yourself as a staunch individualist, as someone who has moved mountains all on your own, but you cannot free yourself from the interconnections of destiny. None of us can. And the sooner you learn that, and embrace it, and learn to look with it, the closer to your true self you will become and your accomplishments will be so great that this moment, this small setback, will seem insignificant by comparison."

Seto shut his eyes tightly. His head was throbbing, his body crumpling under the combined weight of exhaustion and anger. Whenever he had ever thought of destiny he imagined Gozaburo's dinner party—a lot of old men, drunk on pride and greed as much as alcohol, their boisterous voices echoing ghostlike through the empty halls. Shipments of arms to developing countries. Promotion of political instability. Assassination. Corruption. Slaughter. That was the only destiny he knew, and he knew it too well.

Retracing the contours of the memory, he felt a stinging wave as repulsion that oringinted in the soles of his feet and traced its way up through every nerve in his body, like a volcano surging to expunge its venom at the surface. He remembered how badly he wanted to tear that building down. Burn down the mansion. Demolish the old office towers. Make Kaiba Tower explode in an acidic fury—a fitting embodiment of its eternal filth. He wanted to tear down destiny. It tasted like evil to him from the tip of his tongue to the bacteria squirming in his gut.

"Maybe you're right, Isis," he mused, voice accelerating with the spark of a new idea. "Maybe my place is greater than all this here." He paused. "But I'll let you know what I've decided—if I have any relation with destiny at all, it's going to be as the person who destroys it."

Ignited and explosive, Seto leapt from his chair in a flurry of passion and swung past Isis out the door, mind busy tabulating how much dynamite it would take to send Kaiba Tower into eternal oblivion. He moved with precise focus and certainty, as if being guided by a strong-willed and invisible hand.

-break-

I looooove writing interactions between Seto and Isis! They have such different philosophies and represent such different things, yet at the same time have so many things in common. As I was writing this I started to think of it was the sequel to Qui Porte des Oeilleres, only this time the joke is on Seto. Thanks for reading!


	6. Karma Police

Karma Police

"He'll never learn, will he?"

He looks so small and insignificant on the screen. His eyes are alive and on fire, burning so hard that they must be melting the insides of his brain. But the rest of him is tiny, crumpled, pitiful and weak. I feel embarrassed for him, and by extension, for myself.

At the other end of the table, by contrast, Yuugi looks so confident and carefree that it makes me sick. Leaning back in his chair as if he owns it, as if he owns _me_. There's something murderous in the air around them, like they're in the jaws of a giant monster—a poisonous snake. Yuugi sneers, his whole face becomes contorted and devilish, like a mutant. Something in that twists me from the inside like he's got a hand on a wrench in my guts and isn't going to let up until they're spilling across the floor.

He chuckles, a slow bubble like angry, vicious lava lazily running down a mountain. His voice buzzes with static electricity. "He thinks he can bend the rules until they break, that he can step outside the laws of good and evil, and not face any repercussions for it. But where has it gotten him? And now you, Mokuba, where has it gotten you? You're going to lose to me now and you're going to be punished for what you've done and what your brother has done—for flaunting the regulations, for trying to believe that these things don't apply to you."

Mokuba embodies my anger perfectly. Spit flying, fists shaking, he glares at Yuugi from across the table like a wild animal about to pounce on its prey. "Shut up about us!" He cries. It's a pitiful sound, that nasal whine in his voice, but it's effective. "I'm going to beat you! I'll prove you wrong about me—about Nii-sama!" He makes his next move triumphantly, and for a moment I believe him.

He's wrong, though. He won't defeat Yuugi, not today and likely not ever. I've arranged it that way. I am the only one who will ever defeat him, and I'd rather be obliterated like my step-father than give that honor to someone else. I didn't know that my capacity for hatred could ever as deep as it is for his arrogant, sneering face, darkly gleaming eyes, flayed erratic limbs. There's no device precise enough to inflict the kind of damage I want, nothing that can hurt him deeply or completely enough. Not even death would be enough to destroy him. I want him gone, picked apart and blown out of existence. And I want it to hurt. That's what he deserves.

"I'm not wrong, Mokuba. Don't think that you can run away from this. You may think that you're doing the honorable thing—protecting your brother—but this is a struggle that you don't want to get yourself implicated in. It's too much for you. You don't know the full depth of everything that's going on between us, you can't understand the power and danger of what you're getting yourself involved in. I'd rather not have to, believe me, but know that if I have to I will hurt you to accomplish my objective."

"I'm not stupid!" Mokuba's anger is his greatest weakness. It's like the cries of a dying animal. Pitiful. Awful. We can both see it, Yuugi from across the table and me through the fiber optic cables that connect the observation room to the dueling arena. We can see that's he's fading, struggling like an ant under a magnifying lens, and it's only a matter of time before he catches on fire.

I could end it whenever I want. My finger gently flirts with the switch that can disable the electricity. I could deactivate the cage, all the illusions, I could save him. But I want him to learn from what's he done. Let him marinate in the acid of him mistakes and arrogance. He needs to learn. And if he thinks that this punishment is painful then he doesn't know pain.

"I'm not trying to imply that you'll stupid, Mokuba." He twists in his chair slightly, just to show that he can dominate it. I'd love to destroy him myself, to rip him apart. And I'd start with his arrogant tongue. "I'm just trying to give you fair warning that you don't belong in these affairs." He looks away from the table, away from the demonic monsters that are gnawing the air and crawling at their feet. He looks directly at the security camera, right through me. I feel my body burn and shiver at the same time and it makes me want to hurt him more, to run him down into the ground until I force the honor out of him. "It's a shame that your brother is too much of a coward to face me himself, and you'll be the one who has to pay the price." He turns away, runs his fingers through the long spikes of his hair. "But I'll face him soon enough myself." His words feel dark, murky, meandering and sinister.

Mokuba is on the brink of falling apart. I can see four, five moves into the future of this game—the structure of his moves is that predictable and transparent—and I can see now that he's going to lose, and soon. My fingers dig into the arms of my chair, I press my face so close to the screen that the individual pixels seem to scream out at me, call me and beckon me in even closer. I want to see it. I want to watch it all coil and fall apart and smolder like the wreckage of a city after one of Kaiba Corp's bombings.

Looking at the screen, I know that Yuugi can see it too. He's looking at Mokuba like a hunter looks at an animal caught in a cage, so smug, so calm and confident. The shadows are already starting to lurk in closer, just as I've programed them to. They're probably all that Mokuba can see now, those turbid scowling faces and fierce, impaling fangs. On the screen, he trembles and shivers, as if he can feel their presence physically around him. The design must be more realistic than I had predicted.

"This is your last chance, Mokuba." His voice rolls out like thunder. He's looking at Mokuba, but I know his words are directed at me, they hit me like cannon balls and I have to hunch over the table to keep from collapsing, breath heaving out heavily and oily. But I won't let him beat me, not like this.

"Surrender is for the weak…" Mokuba is having trouble getting his words out, and right now I don't know which of them I hate more. One is so pitiful, so comically weak. The other is so rigid, so domineering, so eager to take advantage and uncaring of the consequences.

In an instant Mokuba is gone, engulfed in sea of fiery blackness, leaving only the echo of his screams behind. I notice a collective cringe ripple through the audience, but none of them stop watching. They act repulsed, but at the core they're just as fascinated in seeing what happens as I am, and as remote and disinterested as Yuugi.

He glares up at me, eyes like spears. "Do you see what you've done here, Kaiba? Do you have any notion of the pain that you've caused?" There's a righteous anger in his voice, a sound that swirls like waves of boiling water. "Have you ever taken a moment to reflect on what put us here? On how irresponsible and evil your actions have become? Do you think that you have made the world a better place by what you've done with Kaiba Corp? I know why you did it; you halted the weapons production because you wanted to cleanse the world of violence, of unnecessary destruction. But what you've put in its place is no better. The evil is all still there, only now it's lurking in the corners of your heart instead of being exposed on the surface." He breathes sharply, anger pricking him all over. "The evil is all still here; it's concentrated in every fiber of your soul. You tried to free yourself from your father's legacy, but he's stronger now inside you than he ever was when he was alive. You're still working for him, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not."

His attitude changes now, it's like the anger has evaporated out and left him slightly dehydrated. Now there's only remorse. "You'll have to learn, Kaiba, that external battles are the easiest to fight, but they are the least rewarding. If you truly wish to ever defeat me, you will have to summon the courage to fight with yourself—with the deepest and darkest parts of your own innermost nature. Perhaps even those parts that you don't know you have. It isn't until you have won that battle that you will be prepared to face me."

I can feel the steam coming off me. I will vanquish him, I will drill him into oblivion and strangle that self-righteous preaching out of him. I will show him the full capacity of my power to destroy if it takes me the rest of my life.

"However, until that moment comes, Kaiba—" his voice is so heavy with regret that it makes me want to vomit, "it is my job to eradicate the evil from this world, and if I have to then I will make sure that you are the first thing to be exterminated."

-break-

In case it's not obvious, this takes place during Mokuba's face off with Yami during Death-T. Thanks for reading!


	7. Fitter Happier

Fitter/ Happier

I leaned over the edge of the balcony, arms crossed like a child, lips pursed tight and jaw rigid. I could tell that I was fighting something, something that had bubbled up inside myself quite unexpectedly and now needed to be carefully contained, lest I incriminate myself any further. I shook my head slowly, scolded myself for my impulsive and impudent behavior. It was just that—the past few years had been so tiresome, and so embarrassing…

I had a throbbing headache, and an oppressive weariness in every crevasse of my body as if all the sleep I had ever missed was suddenly catching up with me now, dragging me down and pressing me into the ground. The world seemed to be emitting a kind of piercing, irritating buzz. That must be the broken static of ideological indignation.

I leaned further over the edge of the boat, trying to catch a glimpse of myself in the fractured currents of the tides racing down below me. I tried to comfort myself by thinking that in just a few hours I would be back on my way to Japan, and I would be able to put this whole horrifically surreal chapter in my life behind me. I could go back to straight lines and linear processes, to functional programming, when you always get out exactly what you put in and there is never any randomness or surprises.

The current of my thoughts was interrupted by the clatter of the door behind me, and I spun around to see Jou approaching me, his fists balled, back rigid, and face flushed with ire. I could practically feel the heat radiating off his skin, as if he were a bomb about to explode upon me. I knew as he came closer that I wouldn't have to listen—I knew exactly what he was going to say to me. It's like his brain only run on pre-scripted phrases.

"And just what do you think you're doing, threatening my friend Yuugi like that? He didn't do anything to do! Just because you don't get a chance to duel the pharaoh doesn't mean that you get to go around throwing a hissy fit and picking on everyone else. What gives you the right to enforce your own selfishness and egotism on everyone else?"

He took a step back, his face betraying both his confusion and his astonishment.

"How did you know what I was going to say?"

"We've been running in these same circles for years, I and all your little friends. I would be ashamed of myself I hadn't memorized all your speeches by now."

"Hm…" he paused for a moment to recollect his thoughts. I could tell that I had taken the wind out of his sails, but to retreat now would be to admit that I was right, and he was too stubborn for that. "So if you knew everything that I was going to say, why did you do it?"

I shrugged, folded and unfolded my hands, and didn't take my eyes off the water. "Let's leave the psychological analysis for another time and just leave me alone."

"No, Kaiba, I'm not going to leave you alone! I'm not going to leave until you give me an explanation for what's going on!" He stamped his foot to emphasize his point.

From the firm stance of his body to the sparks flaring in his eyes, I could tell that he intended to stand by his word, but I had no desire to humor him.

"And why should you care about my _feelings_. Aren't I evil to you?"

"What?"

"You called me that once."

I studied his reflection in the moonlit water. It was clearer than mine. I could see him sway and twitch in embarrassment as he tried to find the right words to obscure the truth. It occurred to me that he must have a very kinetic brain, the kind of mind that can't function unless the entire body is in motion.

"Well, you were once." He finally said simply, almost resigned.

"_Once_? So I see I must have risen in your estimation. How _flattering_."

"Hey don't get too excited. You're only…slightly evil now—it's not much of a compliment." His reflection took on a different series of angles now—he was more relaxed. Telling the truth. And trying to be kind to me.

I laughed softly. "Only _slightly_…yes that must be an improvement in your eyes. _Fortunately_ I don't spend too much _time_ wondering whether I'm wanted by that great fraternal moral authority that seems to have the rest of you in _chains_, so I suppose it's not too difficult for me to accept the idea of still being _slightly evil_. Indeed, considering what I'm capable of it's an insult."

"Well, you were once and that didn't turn out very well for anyone."

We passed several moments in silence, listening to the sound of the waves. He kept his eyes resolutely fixed on me and I kept mine on the water. We were clearly testing each other, trying to see who would give in first—who would break the silence, who would turn away. I clenched my silence tightly like a fist, refusing to be the one responsible for breaking it. But he was so persistent with his constant sloppy splatterings of questions and sentimental looks.

"I don't believe that, you know. I've seen the way you treat Mokuba, other kids like that. Sometimes I think that you're not as evil as you pretend to be. But why is it so important for you to beat Yuugi like that? I mean, I'm as stubborn and competitive as the next guy, but even I know when to give it a rest. It's not good for you to go on like this."

Suddenly my silence escaped me in a tightly wadded ball of anger. "Just leave me alone, will you? I don't need your comforting or your pep talks or your advice!" I snarled at his reflection in the water.

He shook his head at me, almost remorsefully it seemed. "I used to be just like you, you know Kaiba. I tried to solve all my problems myself, never talked to anyone, never_ trusted_ anyone. I…felt like I couldn't, the kind of life I was leading. I had so many secrets that no one really knew the real me, not even I did. I thought that was the only way things could be, and I was miserable. But after I met Yuugi everything changed for me. He made me see things differently, see myself differently. He made me want to be a better person, and I can't say that about anyone else. And that's why I don't understand why you seem to hate him so much, why you constantly want to beat him. It seems to me that if you guys could be friends it would make life a lot easier for you. And he wants to be friends with you, we all do. But you don't make it easy for anyone, always pushing people away.

"I've been through some of the same dark places as you. I've been hurt by people that were supposed to protect me. I've done bad things, and I used to think that I was outside the law, better than what other people said was right and wrong. I've been a loser and a jerk and a lost little kid who didn't dare look five years into the future because I didn't know if I was even going to be _alive_ then. I've been in the gutter, and I pulled myself out. But I couldn't have done it alone.

"Look at me." I refused to look at him. "I'm living proof that you can be ambitious, you can have goals and be proud and be stubborn and obnoxious, _and_ you can also be_ happy_. Losing a game doesn't mean you have to lose your life, making a mistake doesn't mean that you have to spend the rest of your life punishing yourself. But to get better first you have to admit that there's something wrong."

His words washed over like those waves had been washing over the shore for thousands of years, and some of them got caught inside me and echoed through me.

"Used to be like me…would make life easier…better..than I am?"

"Yeah, exactly! If you could just learn to put your pride aside every once in a while, it would make you so much happier…better!"

"Less evil."

"More productive."

"Comfortable."

"You'd get along better with people."

"At ease."

"Would be more patient."

"You'd probably even sleep better."

"No bad dreams. No paranoia. No longer afraid of the dark."

"Not so desperate."

"Or childish."

I shook my head furiously to clear the words away, the words that now stung me like caustic acid, biting through my skin and burrowing into my brain. And still that one phrase remained that trumped them all, which seemed to tower over me with its haunting incredibility.

"Used to be like me..." I sneered mockingly. "How could you ever be like me? Or, perhaps a better question, how could I be like _you_?"

I peered closely at his reflection in the water, so intensely that I could feel the center of gravity of my body tipping towards the surface, preparing to pull me down. In the evening light our reflections seemed to blur, merge together until they were indistinguishable.

I spun around to face him, and he wasn't there.

I really did know his voice to well.

I really needed to get some sleep.

-break-

A/N:

This takes place immediately following Seto's confrontation with Yuugi on the ship before his final duel with Yami.

Also, while I enjoy reading traditional puppyshipping fics, they always kind of bother me at the same time. I don't think that the two of them could have a healthy, functional relationship the way it stands in the show because they are, I think, far too alike. I think that Seto resents Joey because he threatens his ideology that the only way to succeed and recover from a traumatic past is to hide it all away and go it alone, and in many ways is living evidence that that ideology is fundamentally flawed. It's an interesting dynamic and something I intend to explore further in the future : )


	8. Electioneering

Electioneering

A lot of people think that before my hostile takeover, Kaiba Corp's primary product was weapons of mass destruction. People think that Kaiba Corp's battles were fought in squalid Third World Countries or between world-class nuclear powers, their fingers resting casually on the triggers that would incinerate the world. They conger up these grotesquely romantic images of blood-drenched soils, skies split open at the seams by the brute force of a nuclear holocaust, broken bodies and fragmented nations.

These images are not inaccurate—I know I still struggle to conceptualize the full scale of human suffering that the _advancements_ of my step father wrought on the world—but I must admit that when I see those images and read the troubling statistics, I feel a distinct lack of sympathy.

It is because those battles are not the battles I witnessed, nor the ones I fought. I was trained to wage war as a one man army, my mind the only advanced technology that was at my disposal. That, and my ability to manipulate. I was in a challenging position, yes, but I was far from the only one who found myself as a lone soldier trying desperately to take on the globe. (I was however, the most successful—though of that I am not sure whether I should be proud or ashamed.)

What many people do not realize is that the Kaiba Corp headquarters were themselves a battleground, and the wars that rocked the building from its ground floor entry to the sparkling penthouse suites were waged by a thousand armies, all blood thirsty, each comprised of one man. I remember how they moved about in their business suits of armor, rolling through the hallways like tanks that were themselves packed with artillery. There was a rush of adrenaline in those rooms as thick as in the trenches of the Maginot Line, but with none of the sense of camaraderie or greater purpose. They clawed at each other with treacherous eyes and spoke with scheming jealous tongues; it was war fueled by deceit more than firepower, and Gozaburo made sure that not of moment of it escaped my notice.

He trusted my intuition, but still never let slip the opportunity to mold me. He used to pass me notes throughout the meetings I attended with him, making sure I took note of one man's posture or another's posturing. I felt a sharp and satisfying rush of confidence as I observed them, knowing that under the right circumstances I would be able to defeat to them. I thought that this power—this ability to overcome, to humiliate and to diminish, must surely be the greatest of human achievements. I felt my pulse race alongside the dismembered, bloody warriors of distant nations—our most prized and valuable customers. I felt my skin scream out with the same anger, the same evolutionary desire to obliterate the competition and crown myself the definitive champion.

I of course had a test to chance my theory, to see if winning in battle was truly the highest pinnacle of human emotion. Watching Gozaburo tumble to his death I saw myself as the shattered warrior, the fearsome rebel leader hurling guns and grenades. I believed this was the greatest form of rebellion, the best way of sending my message to the world that I truly was the most accomplished, the most liberated, an example of some higher form of mankind.

At this point, I've been through enough real battles to know that those thoughts were illusionary. It didn't come for years later, right when I was least excepting it. At the risk of sounding sentimental, it wasn't until I was reunited with Mokuba after defeating Noa that my memories and interpretations of events precipitated in a new and unexpected way, and I realized that this moment I had long revered as my ascent to heroism and greatness was by far one of my weakest and most cowardly. Because at that moment I realized the true essence of the villainy that I had been trying to combat. I realized that my greatest act of rebellion had not been the moment when I fought all others down in order to prove my superiority to them, it was when I defeated those forces of division and alienation to fight for someone else.

I am most liberated not as a warrior but as a conscientious objector, by refusing to demean and therefore refusing to be demeaned. And that, I believe, is the greatest act of rebellion there is.

I shudder at the thought that Yuugi might actually have been right about something.


	9. Climbing Up the Walls

Climbing Up the Walls

It's dark out now. I know without having to turn that the lights—the few of them that are still burning—of the office buildings across the street are boring into my back like a myriad of hungry eyes, greedily ingesting my every movement. I am used to being regarded in that way, with a mix of repulsion and envy.

Nights like this I feel like I'm the only one alive. The only one who is really alive. I go through my days trying to communicate with sleepwalkers, zombies who gaze up at me with pale eyes and vapid expressions. I toil in vain to find some spark of intelligence inside them, to find someone who can stand on the same level ground as me, who can scale the same heights without stumbling and continually glancing down to the ground below. It makes the daylight hours insufferable, living in this watered down world where all the color is drained from brilliance and every echo is muffled by the white noise of idiocy.

During the day I am alone in spirit, at night I am in alone in practice—and this seems to make more sense to me. To be in a physical environment that reflects my conception of reality makes it seems more understandable somehow, makes it easier to comprehend. And amid the abandoned offices I can let my mind wander without meeting any unwarranted obstructions. The night sky becomes the canvas of my imagination. All the sights, all the sounds and all the colors are restored to me in their full glory. I find the isolation invigorating.

Working at my desk I am doing more than sitting. Every muscle taunt, mind reeling, heart pounding, at every moment my mind and body are in a race. During the day I allow my mind to unfurl and my body to go lax because I face no real competition in that realm—no real threat. But at night, surrounded by nothing but brocades of silence, I can finally meet my match. My one true rival, the one man I will race in vain with my entire life until my legs give out and I collapse in a heap of my own perspiration and defeat.

There was a time when this man was me. Not me exactly, but the image I had of myself in the future. I was in a race against time, fighting every second off so that I could become the man I knew I ought to be. My enemies were my own expectations, and they never missed an opportunity to crush and humiliate me. I allowed this because that was a race I had never really wanted to win, not truly. To defeat my own expectations would mean that I had reached my own limits of greatness, that there would be no more mountains to conquer, nothing more to attain. That victory—had I ever achieved it—would have been entirely bitter as it would have rendered the remainder of my existence static and meaningless. This was one game that I was proud to lose.

But all that changed when I met Yuugi—or…the other Yuugi. Yuugi Moto means less than nothing to me—when he is not in the dueling arena. Nine tenths of the time he is just like everyone else—dull around the edges, mind as muddled as the sky during a rainstorm. But every once in a while he manages to crystalize a clear thought and it's like a ray of sun coming down and shining right on me—burning me with its prowess.

Even the thought makes me shiver. Behind his deck of cards he becomes everything—everything I never believed I would find in another person. I saw it in his face the first time he defeated me and it struck me with such a jolt that I was certain my heart had stopped beating. It was like I had been slammed into the dirt, ground away into nothingness, forced to jerk my head up and acknowledge that there was a new sun in the sky—a sun whose brilliance far outshone my own. And in that moment I knew the race was finally over. I would never have to compete against myself when someone like him walked the earth.

I wish my mind didn't retrace these same circles. I've thought all these thoughts before, and yet I continually force myself to revisit them, force myself to review all the facts that are already tattooed into my memory. As I grind my fingers bitterly into the keyboard I cannot help but hear his voice in my head, low and melodious and enrapturing. I can almost feel him sitting in my skull, shooting me that demonic smirk that seems to come from another world as he rubs me between his fingers, knowing that he owns me.

He owns me because he now holds my future tight in shackles. The moment he handed me my first defeat me robbed me of my greatest rival, greatest inspiration, my most intimately reviled and sacred hero—that platinum-plated vision I had had of myself as the conqueror of worlds and leader of centuries. And he pasted his face everywhere mine had been—guaranteeing that everywhere I turned I would see him, that I would see the stamp of his influence on everything that had once been mine, created by me and for me alone. With one swift move he inserted himself in my skull, in my bones, in the deepest trenches of my heart, and started spreading like some kind of vile cancer.

He robbed me of my future in that moment—perhaps of my past as well. He took the best in me and locked it away in a cupboard. He killed the man of the future and forced me solidly into the present, rendering all my goals and expectations greyed and cracked and faded. And for that I can never forgive him. But, perhaps the most bitter thing to acknowledge, I cannot forgive myself.

I'm still running that race—the race against the dawn, the race against human progress. But now he is the one that stretches towards the finish line—that beautiful golden pinnacle that allows rises just beyond the horizon. And I'm fruitlessly climbing up the walls.


	10. No Surprises

"What is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness." – Don Draper, _Mad Men_

* * *

After it all ended I made a journey that I had never anticipated. It wasn't my idea—Mokuba, still somewhat shaken and confused about the events that had transpired over the past several years expressed an interest in visiting our childhood home. I was initially dismissive and became increasingly irritated each time he broached the subject. It was not that I disrespected his wishes, but that I could not understand them. Our former life has always struck me as largely irrelevant—a small footnote at the end of a voluminous text that inspires little curiosity and invites no explanation.

However, as I am sure is common knowledge, Mokuba's mind is not the same machine as mine. He is gentler around the edges, has more sparkle in his eyes. As these are traits that I have always admired and tried to preserve in him, it seemed cruel to refuse the repercussions of his heightened sentimentality. So we prepared for a journey into the past.

Our time traveling expedition took us through the blustery suburbs of Moscow—a jumbled mess of gray-faced apartment blocks and labyrinthine walkways, all smeared in a dirty fog that clings shamelessly to every surface. To make matters worse, neither of us could remember the exact address of our former home and all records on the matter had been lost, reducing us to the state of vagabonds circling the crumbling streets in an erratic, purposeless stupor.

I had just about neared the end of my patience when I heard Mokuba gasp beside me then become completely silent, as if all the air had been forced out of him. I turned to follow his line of vision and felt a similar shock—it was there. Quiet, unassuming, it almost blended into the background. But it echoed with a pang of familiarity that was impossible to ignore, a loud bang in the back of my mind at some door that I had long ago locked and forgotten. Stumbling through it again now was a shock, and definitely not a pleasant one. I decided to let Mokuba has his moment of awe and bereavement and then evacuate the area as quickly as possible.

I waited for a moment, carefully counting off the seconds on my watch, but he was still transfixed, eyes pried open wide by wonder. Feeling myself becoming exasperated, I tried to break his meditative state.

"Okay, you've seen it. Can we _leave_ now?"

He turned to me in confusion. "We came all this way and you just want to turn around and go back?"

"Yes. That it precisely what I want. Now are we going or not?"

He was silent for another moment. "Doesn't it make you think…of what might have happened if we had never left here?"

"No."

"How can it not? Our lives might have been completely different if…Dad" (he uttered the word with the uncertainty of someone taking their first stab at a foreign language) "hadn't died. I mean, our lives would have been completely different! We never would have gone to Japan or met Yuugi or Isis….there's so much that never would have happened…" He left out the one thing that was looming in both our minds, the one thing we both could have done without having happened.

I sighed. "I don't think about those things because it's irrelevant. No matter what happened or didn't happen in the past there's no point in thinking about it now when we can't change it. It's a waste of time and energy."

"I know." We continued to stand for a moment, watching the sun blink in and out of view behind the thick curtain of clouds.

"I know it doesn't change anything, but there were times when we were in danger, or I thought you were in danger, and I couldn't help but wish that things hadn't turned out this way. Like, maybe if something had been different then we would have been happier if we could have just been…normal." He shrugged. "It's stupid I guess. I mean, we've turned out pretty good and we had some pretty cool adventures, but…I just wanted to know what it would feel like to come back."

"But this isn't what you wanted, is it?"

He shook his head. "It doesn't feel like I thought it would."

He's right. The buildings, the trees, the streets and the whole city itself feels like it's been rendered in miniature. Everything seems small and distant, it's too unfamiliar to be placed in any meaningful context. Letting my mind wander over the blank eyes of the windows and faded facades and trying to project my memories onto them is like trying to rebuild a shattered puzzle—like fixing something that fundamentally wants to stay broken.

He can feel it, but he can't articulate those thoughts. The only thing he can express is disappointment. What he can't put into words is the realization that by returning to this place he was trying the lock on a gate to a life that no longer exists, and no matter how hard he turns that key it won't be enough to bend the fabric of space-time that keeps us on the other side. Because time only goes one way. At least, most of the time.

We take the bus back into the main city, having not trusted our own car on the more precarious streets. It's rush hour, and the bus is packed with fatigued faces and stooping figures, ready to retreat from the day and huddle in the safety of their homes for sustenance.

I wonder if this was the life that Mokuba had envisioned for us when he spoke of normalcy. Because when I see these people I see people who have surrendered the desire to fight, their will to achieve. Examining Mokuba from the corner of my eye I know that this is never the life he would have wanted, even if he cannot fully understand that himself right now. We cannot live a quiet life, smooth and even and straight.

I won't attempt to draw the line between genetics and environment, to try and find a perfectly linear cause and effect relationship between each variable that has played a role in my development and where I stand now, but here, drifting through the streets of Moscow I feel that same tug—the pull I felt lying unconscious on my foster parent's floor, the same beckoning that called from somewhere inside me when I first laid eyes on the Blue Eyes White Dragon, on Yuugi, on Gozaburo. It was like a soft whisper or delicate tap on the shoulder, telling me that the life I wanted would never bear the faintest resemblance to what anyone would consider "normal."

Because what's normal for most people is stultifying—it's going through life without meeting rivals and thus without making progress, it's never looking beyond their immediate goals to what would be greater, it's watching idly as their lives unravel and never being surprised by anything.

As we watch the buildings flash by in the glaze of the setting sun I wonder if this homecoming felt so alien because this city had never been my home at all. Through the window every vista seems so fleeting, like a moment snatched away too quickly to be fully understood or appreciated, and there's something about that I can't let help but let reverberate inside me. For every experience I've ever had, no matter how momentous it seemed at the time, has whittled away in time. Even those identities—those states—that at the time felt like they would last forever had a way of dissolving around me.

Maybe by returning here Mokuba was hoping to make these sun-splattered moments last a little longer, to find something solid and permanent at the end of all this wind swept and rocky terrain that we could say was definitively ours. Maybe he wanted to find one thing that he knew would last forever, only to realize that is has long since disappeared.

Trying to not let these musing get the better of me, I ruffle his hair and manage to catch the tail end of his rueful smile. He will realize in time that the life of a beacon has its own set of advantages: an existence devoid of resignation, an unappeasable thirst for the pinnacle of being—the ability to face all the surprises that we meet.

Break-

In my personal Yu Gi Oh universe Seto and Mokuba were originally born in Russia, shuffled across the country after their parent's death and eventually discovered by Gozaburo while on some kind of quasi peacemaking mission with his nation's former enemy. I know it's not cannon but it's fun to imagine : )


	11. Lucky

Lucky

Resurrected. That is how history will remember it. At this very moment, on the wind and in the waters there are whispers of rebirth; even the ashes seem to sizzle with some kind of dawning awareness of the sweeping changes taking place around them. Egypt has been saved from the brink of total collapse, pulled off the ledge of destruction, has both thwarted evil and sent it running for cover. A hero has risen from the rubble and adopted the responsibility of restoring balance, peace, and serenity to a world that has sorely missed them for too many years to count.

I am that hero. At least, that's what they tell me. The few surviving peasants, the even fewer surviving nobles. They come clambering at my feet, eyes shining with relief and gratitude, convinced that now everything will be calm, that I will set the world to rights again. As if I could somehow shift the orbits of the stars.

I know what I should be feeling—pride, unabashed and glorious. With the swift passing of just a few years I have elevated myself from the proletariat to the class of gods on earth. Sweeping aside centuries of social immobility, elegantly dismantling every obstacle that was stacked against me, I have finally attained the position that I somehow sensed was mine for the taking as soon as I was old enough to formulate conscious thought. I should feel justified, righteous, as if I could wield the fiery power of the sun with my fingertips and force the world to bow to my vast and unlikely accomplishments. However, now that I have ascended, now that I have defeated everything and everyone that has ever stood in my way, I am not sure what exactly it was that I was fighting for.

They all crowd around me, as if the very act of being in my presence could somehow restore to them everything that they have lost. They do not voice their questions, but I can feel their concerns streaming out of them. What will I do to protect Egypt? How will I keep the world from falling into the smarmy grasp of evil?

The truth is: I will do nothing at all.

I did not save this world, if anything I have only endangered it. If the root of this evil was the silenced voice of oppression, the tyranny of social inequality, the anxieties and greed of the powerful and the fears of the powerless, then I have created far more evil than I could ever expunge. I spent my entire adolescence convinced that Egypt was the purest source of light and happiness in this world. That was the ideal that I believed I was protecting when I fought for the pharaoh, it was what I believed I was maintaining when I harvested the souls of the people who were in the most desperate need of my assistance.

But with every layer that has been pulled back from this mystery the more convoluted and inconsistent these ideals become. I realize now that I never fought to protect the pharaoh at all—I fought to maintain a system that thrived on the blood of those whose only crime in life was to be born less fortunate. And now I cannot shield myself from the knowledge that—as these people look to me with loyalty and devotion—I am only endangering them further by perpetuating a structure that is nothing if not a breeding ground for the exact type of evil that I have supposedly vanquished. I am finally fully awake now, and I long for the innocence of sleep.

I cannot save this country now. My only hope is that one day I can.


	12. The Tourist

"_The term 'dialogism' is most commonly used to denote the quality of an instance of discourse that explicitly acknowledges that it is defined by its relationship to other instances, both past, to which it responds, and future, whose response it anticipates." – The Living Handbook of Narratology _

The Tourist

The moment he hits the ground I feel it too. The pain, the shock, the complete lack of consciousness and self-awareness stabs at me as if a sword had just been driven through my chest, and without being able to fully explain why I find myself buckled over, heaving out buckets of air. I wrap my arms tight around my torso, as if in an attempt to keep him out, and even though I was not his intended victim it feels like he has somehow snaked his way up through my brainstem as well.

Suddenly I'm in my office in Japan, idly letting the Millennium Eye slide between my fingers and wondering how it is that one piece of ancient gold can render people so completely vulnerable and intensely helpless.

For a moment I'm looking over my shoulder at the sunset-splattered colors of the destruction of KaibaCorp Island as it rears like a beast towards the horizon then collapses back into the shore. I can bite down and taste blood and I imagine it is the blood of everything I have destroyed and abandoned.

For an instant my vision blurs and I feel like I've been bound in a stranger's skin, unwilling or unable to face the fact that I will never meet the standards of success that I set for myself, that there will always be a competitor who is one precarious breath away from obliterating me completely. I act like I despise him for the fact that he can defeat me, but honestly I only despise myself.

Suddenly I'm standing in Pegasus' dingy basement, only able to look on in rancor and terror as the life force of the only person I have ever loved and longed to protect is robbed from me. And I am completely impotent, as immobilized and useless as a ghost. As his spirit goes I feel mine draining as well, as if my spirit was dependent on his. As if he was somehow furnishing me with energy, keeping me alive.

For a moment I'm standing on the table in the boardroom, my eyes burning a hole in the broken window. My hands are still hot, and I can feel the neat spider web trails of blood dripping down my fingers and falling like raindrops on the pristine white carpet floor. I don't turn around—some kind of unspoken rule book has passed between us and I can feel the environment in the room changing by the second. Everyone is calculating, trying to determine how they can manipulate the latest turn of events to their best advantage. And it doesn't take me long to realize that I have come out the loser. They now have a secret on me, and with that the power to control me. In the end I have just exchanged one cage and set of handcuffs for another.

For an instant I am seeing Noa for the last time, though I do not know it. Gozaburo pats me on the back, tells me I should be glad that I have won. I should be proud. Noa was the first of many adversaries that I will face, and my ruthlessness and exacting lack of empathy will certainly prove invaluable as I face the second set of challenges. I wonder where they are taking him, that little boy with the wide vacant eyes , but it doesn't occur to me to ask. I guess that I don't want to know.

Suddenly Mokuba is grabbing my hand at our father's funeral, and I know that in that gesture he is investing in me the role of father. In his hand I hold the responsibility to be kind, to be wise, to be put his interests always above my own and to protect him. I know that I have already failed to live up to these expectations, and at the thought that I have failed my first self-administered performance evaluation I grimace and feel close to fainting.

And, at last, I am standing on the palace steps, and under the expectant and misery-soaked eyes of my new subjects, I take the Millennium puzzle and hurl it to the ground. As it shatters into dozens of sun drenched golden pieces I realize that I have finally freed myself from the shackles of helplessness, from the continuous cycle of oppression, corruption, and misery.

At the last memory I jerk back into consciousness as if having been submerged in icy water. For I feel that I have made some gross violation—I have stolen someone else's memory and therefore stolen part of his life as well.

Or has he stolen mine?

I watch with wide eyes as he battles with the beast inside him, wrestling himself to the ground and writhing with agony as his body attempts to destroy everything that his mind and his heart hold dear. I watch as he toys with self-destruction, wanting to destroy the source of his unhappiness and his anger and realizing with revulsion that it has all originated within himself. I watch as he wills himself to be free of some nameless evil, some persistent doom that has haunted him his entire life and worked its way through his subconscious like a parasite.

With every moment he becomes closer to liberation, and each step he takes makes me feel somehow lighter, more exposed and raw. Vulnerable. It feels as if I am opening some door within myself that I had long ago locked and forgotten, and now the hinges are screaming and coated in rust.

And then there is a breaking point. Like the sun cracking over the horizon and burning away the final traces of night, something shatters within me and seems to reverberate all around. Standing before me is the same man, and objectively I can see that his features are similar enough to mine to mistake us for twins. But I can no longer recognize him. Face clear and composed, eyes sparkling, the faintest glimmer of a smile tugging at the corner of his lips—he is the same and yet completely transformed.

He regards me in silence for a moment, face painted with a look that speaks of both pride and sympathy. Then he slowly turns away, calling over his shoulder in a voice that slides like silk and echoes like iron, "You're welcome."

I stand rooted in my spot for a moment longer, stunned as if struck by lightning, and shivering, feeling that my mass has been reduced by half. I watch as his figure retreats into the distant sun, and can feel with certainty that our paths will not cross again. Voice shaking and senses still off balance, I utter my reply.

"Thank you."

-break-

I finally made it to the end! This chapter was definitely the hardest to write—I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be some kind of confrontation between Seto and his former self but it took me a while to find a good way of going about it.

I hope you have all enjoyed this story. I have enjoyed writing it. Many of these chapters have taken on a kind of semi-autobiographical meaning to me, and I've often felt like I was writing a diary more than writing fan fiction. So for all the people who have given me positive feedback on those chapters—thank you—it has meant a lot to me.


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